Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
FAIR
Far-Right Scores Neb. Law Banning Immigrant Renters
01 year ago
Last night, voters in Fremont, Nebraska, made their town of 25,000 famous by passing an anti-immigrant law–authored by the same far-right lobbyist who wrote Arizona’s racial profiling law–that criminalizes renting homes to undocumented immigrants.
The AP reported that the measure passed with 57 percent of voters’ approval. It requires all renters to register with the police to get the right to take up residence in the town. Landlords who are caught renting to undocumented immigrants would be sanctioned, as would employers who hire undocumented immigrants. These purported small-town defenders are not new. Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and Farmers Branch, Texas, have also gained notoriety in the last five years for passing strikingly similar legislation, which has been challenged in the courts.
But these bills aren’t popping up coincidentally. The Fremont law was written with the help of Kris Kobach, the far-right immigration restrictionist who crafted Arizona’s SB 1070 and has had a hand in many of the Arizona copycat bills that are being picked up around the country.
ColorLines’ Seth Wessler reported in May on the decidedly un-grassroots movement behind these myriad anti-immigrant bills:
[The] FAIR network is no mere collection of researchers and legal advocates. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, FAIR has accepted more than $1 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund, which espouses a connection between race and intelligence and has supported eugenics projects for more than 70 years. In 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center added FAIR to its list of organized hate groups because of FAIR and Tanton’s connections with white supremacist organizations and funders.
It’s now clear that the Arizona law emerged because FAIR and a number of its organizational offspring used the Grand Canyon State as a staging ground for the first in what they hoped would be an onslaught of similar state laws. In at least seven of the 11 states where SB 1070-like legislation has been introduced or where legislators have said they’re drafting it, the lawmakers behind the efforts are members of FAIR’s state legislators’ group.
We’ll update Seth’s tracking of the right’s effort to spread anti-immigrant local laws later this week.
Top to Bottom, FAIR is Steeped in Extremism
01 year ago
‘What’s in a name?’ is an especially relevant question when it comes to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). For an organization with such a benign moniker, it has a whole lot of hate propping it up. Go to FAIR’s website and at first glance it may seem like just another conservative, beltway organization; relatively boring, chock full of links to articles and “factual” data on immigration, but lurking a few clicks away are clues to FAIR’s more sinister core.
FAIR was founded 30 years ago by John Tanton to address his obsession with racial eugenics, population growth, scarcity of resources, and more specifically which population group would have control of said resources. Tanton believed that the majority of immigrants were and would continue to be non-white, hence immigration became a convenient intersection and entry point for his agenda three decades ago. Immigration was a threat to Tanton’s vision for America and he set out to stop it.
Despite rooting it in racially extreme ideas, Tanton has increasingly mainstreamed his organization to achieve maximum political impact; however, FAIR’s reputation took a turn for the worst when it solicited and received 1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund in the 1990s. The Pioneer Fund was founded to promote the genes of white European Americans and funds groups who promote “race-betterment” – a controversial theory that supports the biological IQ difference between white and non-white people. In the 1930s the Pioneer Fund distributed propaganda films developed by the Nazi Party in Germany to public schools.
With that kind of financial support Tanton was able to build his empire of anti-immigrant groups that naturally attracted individuals with politically extreme ideologies that fit its own, mostly white nationalists.
Case in point, Concerned Citizens and Friends of illegal Immigration Law Enforcement (CCFIILE) is a Massachusetts-based group promoted on FAIR’s website as a state contact. One of FAIR’s main objectives is to foster anti-immigrant action at the local level. So it lists, promotes or supports dozens of state-level groups in an effort to network anti-immigration activists.
Just one problem, not only does CCFIILE crudely bash immigrants, but most of its content is dedicated to anti-Semitic videos and holocaust revisionism. It’s an unapologetic and ugly display of neo-Nazi propaganda.
The Anti-Defamation League has this to say about CCFIILE’s leader, Jim Rizoli:
Jim Rizoli, an anti-immigrant activist and anti-Semite based in Framingham, Massachusetts, delivered a lengthy diatribe promoting Holocaust denial during the October 20, 2009 segment of his public access television show. Along with his twin brother Joe, Rizoli runs Concerned Citizens and Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement (CCFIILE), a group founded in 2003.
Mainly known for demonizing Brazilian immigrants in Framingham, Rizoli took more than ten minutes of his hour-long show to defend Iranian President and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and to promote his own anti-Semitic views. Before launching into his diatribe, Rizoli spent the vast majority of his show discussing undocumented immigrants as “crimaliens” who “God doesn’t really care much about.”
This is hardly new territory for FAIR; Tanton has funded and promoted the work of white nationalist leader Jared Taylor. Taylor is both a member of the old White Citizens Council, and founder of the racist eugenicist publication, American Renaissance. In 2005, Jared Taylor would write that when black people are left on their own, “any kind of civilization disappears.” in response to Hurricane Katrina.
Even FAIR’s own staffers and board members have let slip their extremely bigoted beliefs. In 2000, Tanton’s Advisory Board Member Donald Mann was quoted as saying, “We should give incentives to low-income people who agree to sterilization. We should make available free abortions to low-income people on demand.”
Another of Tanton’s D.C.-based anti-immigrantion groups, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), promotes the white nationalist website VDARE, which publishes the works of numerous white nationalists, including Jared Taylor and the late Sam Francis. The website also features Kevin MacDonald, the anti-Semitic California State University-Long Beach Professor.
FAIR’s close associations with extreme bigotry are inexcusable. It is time for FAIR’s leadership to come clean on their racist agenda.
Anti-immigrant Forces Target Struggling American Communities
01 year ago
by Jill Garvey
in Anti Immigration, Center for Immigration Studies, FAIR, Federal Immigration Law, Federation For American Immigration Reform, Fremont Nebraska, Immigration, Immigration Laws, John Tanton, John Tanton Network, Kris Kobach, Nebraska Community Colleges, Politics, Racial Profiling, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Undocumented Immigrants
Kobach
Tanton
The man at the heart of the most influential anti-immigrant network in the country, John Tanton, has created an empire of organizations consisting of lobbyists, lawyers, legislators, and “experts” who have infiltrated the very depths of social and political debate.
Lately, that has been no more apparent than in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where the Tanton Network’s favorite attorney, Kris Kobach, is busy working with notoriously brutal Sheriff Joe Arpaio. A Kansas attorney, professor, and politician with controversial associations, Kobach has a history of preying on vulnerable communities. Communities weakened, for example, by corruption or political division.
Maricopa County residents learned that the hard way when Kobach abruptly appeared with a plan to train over 800 deputies in the art of terrorizing the immigrant community. Supporters of Kobach’s program say it will help local deputies enforce federal immigration law, but fail to take a cue from the federal government’s recent decision to strip deputies of their power to make immigration arrests. Additionally, it does little to help the sheriff’s office fend off persistent accusations of racial profiling and related legal troubles.
Maricopa residents aren’t alone.
Last year Kobach partnered with a small group of Fremont, Nebraska residents to propose a city ordinance that would make it a crime to aid or abet undocumented immigrants. And just last month Kobach sued the Board of Regents for the University of Nebraska System, the Board of Governors for the State College System, and the Board of Governors for each of the Nebraska Community Colleges to end the practice of public universities offering in-state tuition to students who cannot prove citizenship. Interestingly, fewer than 50 undocumented students are receiving in-state tuition at Nebraska’s colleges and universities.
Kobach has attempted to pass severe anti-immigration laws in towns across Pennsylvania, California, Missouri, and Texas. What do these communities have in common besides Kris Kobach? They reap no benefits from the anti-immigrant laws and ordinances he is trying to implement and are often left with a costly legal mess.
In Hazelton, PA, after an ordinance crafted by Kobach and fellow IRLI attorney Michael Hethmon was struck down by a federal judge, the city was forced to pay for all legal fees.
Mr. Kobach has penetrated all these communities while drawing a hefty paycheck from the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of the anti-immigrant group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Southern Poverty Law Center, a respected civil rights organization, lists FAIR as a hate group on its website, based on FAIR’s association with white nationalist organizations.
What appears to the public as a myriad of voices advocating for immigration enforcement is nothing more than a series of front groups and spin-offs seeking to overwhelm reasonable debate on immigration. Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform 30 years ago and shortly thereafter U.S. Inc. These two entities jointly fund and support most of today’s national anti-immigrant groups. They operate under names like Center for Immigration Studies which serves as the Network’s quasi-think tank, or the Coalition for the Future American Worker which pretends to be the voice of American workers. Names meant to belie the most sinister aspect of John Tanton’s Network. Civil rights groups continue to uncover the Tanton Network’s troubling associations with racists, white supremacists, and political extremists. One is the Pioneer Fund, a foundation committed to eugenics and “scientific racism”. The Pioneer Fund provided John Tanton with the funding he needed to build a multi-million dollar operation.
Anti-immigrant groups are using vulnerable communities like Maricopa County and Fremont to give their leadership mainstream legitimacy in the immigration debate, regardless of the cost to residents. While the Phoenix community embroils itself in a costly debate, Kris Kobach is busy building his campaign for Secretary of State in Kansas and his national political profile.
The Tanton Network’s agenda is obvious – create racial divisions among Americans using immigrants as the wedge. In communities across the nation, from Arizona to Nebraska to Pennsylvania, our towns and cities have become casualties of the anti-immigrant movement’s intolerant agenda. Before anti-immigrant rhetoric takes hold, they must loudly and collectively reject extremist groups. It is in our nation’s best interest.